NBC stations reveal nuclear workers suffering severe brain damage and more

[Peter Lemkin]

Hanford's Toxic Legacy
John Howieson, MD and Sean Tenney
Oregonians are generally aware of our state's natural environment, and justly proud of it. With a stunning coastline, the fertile Willamette Valley, the coastal and Cascade Mountains in the west and the Wallowa Mountains in the east, and the high desert among Oregon's many natural attractions, there are innumerable delights to be enjoyed. That's the good news. The bad news is that we also have thirteen incomplete Superfund cleanup sites contaminating our state, a significant dead zone in the ocean off the central coast (the exact cause of which has not yet been fully determined), a major earthquake sometime in our future and the world's worst nuclear contamination site, the Hanford Nuclear Reservation, just a few hours east of Portland along the Columbia River.
Contamination at Hanford is so severe, these machines will ultimately be buried on-site.
Surprisingly, many Oregonians appear to be blissfully unaware of the last of these problems, even though it poses a continuing threat to the Columbia River bordering our state, to our largest city, and to the health of citizens throughout the Northwest. Created under the auspices of the Manhattan Project to produce plutonium for nuclear weapons during World War Two, the Hanford site began almost immediately to release radioactive and toxic chemical contaminants into the air and soil of the surrounding region and into the Columbia River, our once pristine source of irrigation, power, salmon, and recreation. It wasn't long before the public health effects of these releases became apparent, especially among Hanford site workers and "downwinders," area residents who lived in close proximity to the facility's radioactive and chemical pollution.
The worst of the contamination at Hanford was caused by pumping the clear, cool river water through nine plutonium-producing reactors to carry away the huge amounts of excess heat, the unused by-product of the process that produced plutonium, the explosive element at the core of nuclear bombs. After a cooling off period, this irradiated water was then dumped directly into the ground or into poorly lined storage tanks, making its way into the groundwater and into the Columbia. More contamination came from aerial releases, some of them intentional, and the dumping of chemically and radioactively toxic materials into 43 miles of unlined trenches and open, often unmarked pits throughout the site, an unfortunate approach that has made the cleanup of Hanford especially problematic.
Eight of the nine reactors ceased operation by 1971. The Hanford site is now formally managed by the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE), with the Washington State Dept. of Ecology and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) regulating the DOE's activities there. Since 1989 the mandate of the DOE is no longer the production of plutonium, but rather the cleanup of the environmental disaster left by previous generations. The cleanup is expected to cost upwards of $215 billion and take until at least 2060 to complete, though both cost and time estimates continue to rise. This legacy, which the DOE must now attempt to mitigate, includes nine dangerously radioactive nuclear reactors, eight of which have been, or are to be, encased in concrete and left for future generations to dismantle.
On a recent public tour of Hanford, members and staff of Oregon PSR were shown the decommissioned and decontaminated B Reactor, the first of its size capable of producing usable amounts of weapons grade plutonium. We were supposed to be awed
by the engineering achievement, but were simultaneously appalled by the terrible consequences of this effort. For
every ton of uranium subjected to neutron bombardment, only a miniscule amount of plutonium was produced. The separation of this plutonium resulted in tons of toxic and lethally radioactive waste and 53 million gallons of liquid waste remaining in 177 underground tanks, many of them increasingly leaky, awaiting processing in an as yet only half built $12.5 billion chemical plant. The plant is designed to turn this dangerous material into more safely storable glass through a process known as vitrification, but storage and disposal are not synonymous, especially when one considers the longevity of this materials' radioactive toxicity. In addition, it is estimated that there is about 25 million cubic feet of solid radioactive waste, much of which will be buried on site in excavations euphemistically called an Environmental Recovery Disposal Facility (ERDF).
The most contaminated location aside from the reactors is the "central plateau" where the "tank farms" and the plutonium finishing plant are located. We saw these sites on our way to the ERDF but, of course, viewed them from a safe distance. As with other aspects of the tour, we were left to marvel at the technological prowess of this, the largest and most expensive environmental cleanup project in the Western Hemisphere, while being challenged to reconcile this with the reality of Hanford's original purpose: production of the base materials for weapons of mass destruction, including the plutonium used in the "Fat Man" weapon that ultimately took the lives of an estimated 80,000 mostly civilian Japanese at Nagasaki in 1946. As we toured the B Reactor museum, we found that the exhibits and tour guide presentations devoted to the building of the first plutonium bomb were completely devoid of information about the impacts of the bomb on the people of Nagasaki. While the tour guides were generally forthcoming regarding Hanford's colossal environmental impact, some of us couldn't escape the feeling that we were being subjected to no small amount of pro-nuclear industry propaganda.
Oregon PSR will continue to monitor Hanford cleanup efforts, with John Howeison as our point person serving on the Hanford Advisory Board and closely following developments. We will be asking our members to weigh in on Hanford cleanup issues whenever we feel that we can make a meaningful difference. We are also working to confront the massive public health threats posed by the nuclear power industry, including the Columbia Generating Station located at Hanford, through our newly formed Oregon/Washington Joint Nuclear Power Task Force.